O2 planning mobile wallet app with NFC support

And so the NFC juggernaut inches a little further forward: mobile provider O2 has announced a new range of partners for its mobile payments services, and says it is “committed to launching a mobile wallet service during the second half of 2011”.

The platform will provide the latest evolution in the payment services offered by the network, and looks likely to include support for NFC payments on smartphones with the technology on board.

The announcement of the payment services roadmap over on the O2 News Centre blog focuses mainly on the corporate aspects of the scheme, revealing that Intelligent Environments, Wave Crest, FIS and Visa Europe have been lined up as partners.

But it also goes into detail on the individual elements set to roll out later in the year to O2 subscribers, all of which will appear under the O2 Money banner.

“O2 has committed to launching a mobile wallet service during the second half of 2011 which will start the process of taking the contents of the physical wallet and putting them on a mobile phone,” the network says.

The digital wallet app, which will be developed by Intelligent Environments, will be compatible with “a wide range of mobile devices”. Presumably this will include whatever NFC-capable handsets are around at the time, though we assume it's not a necessity, unless O2's concept of a wide range is a lot narrower than our own.

didn't they also say that chip and pin would reduce fraud ? increasing the number of ways to pay for things in general will leave the banks more susceptible to fraud, regardless of what research has said or done.... when take up increases so will attempts to pull the system apart.

Chip & PIN has reduced fraud associated with Mag stripe replication.
No-one has come up with viable usable chip & PIN hack. Yes it's been done in Labs but that doesn't equate to real world scenarios. Identity theft is still the biggest type of fraud out there.

You won't need another card. You'll have your phone
So......
Living and working in London for a major financial institution like I do I can definitely see the benefits, knowing what I know about the payment card industry. I can see why not everyone would agree, but each to their own.
Look at it this way, if you were queueing for your lunch at Pret-a-manger and which queue would you rather be in:-
The POS till where everyone has to enter their PIN, wait for authorisation then wait for their receipt.
The Cash till where the woman in front decides once she's been told how much, THEN decides to hunt for her purse and after much furious counting decides she doesn't have enough change before handing over a tenner for her £4.39 sammich
Or the queue where people have the wave pay facility. Blip. And off you go. No PIN, no authorisation, no change. simples.

Mrew, this country is ages behind in credit card transactions. You don't need to sign in US for under $25 transaction and entering your PIN every time is dumbest thing ever invented. US had Blink cards for a while already, you use it like a work ID - just tap scanner with it. NFC is just another prepaid card that banks plan to make money off - you would need to put readers everywhere and who do you think will pay for it, if not you? It will not be any more secure that plastic, nor more convenient. It's a good idea and hopefully it will take off and work, but approach is wrong. You have to link NFC directly to your bank account with ability to specify limit of how much you are willing to spend per transaction. Anything above that limit should require further authorization as protection in case of theft.

Chase in US has Android app that allows you to do banking directly from your phone. You can even take a picture of a bank check and have it virtually deposited. No need to go to a branch. NFC should be integrated directly to phone app from your bank independent of which phone you have, which SIM card it is and where you are in the world.

The US don't even use Chips in most of their cards so aren't even EMV compliant. Fraud is absolutely rife. I'm not here to argue which is the best.
I'm not saying NFC is the answer to everything but it's certainly got its merits.
Let's just agree to differ eh?